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A Taste of Peru – Gastón Acurio’s new spin off in Geneva

“Yakumanka”, the new Gastón Acurio restaurant at Mandarin Oriental in Geneva, takes gourmets and hotel guests on a culinary trip through eras and climate zones.

Astrid y Gastón

Gregor Zimmermann inherited his talent and the calling for cookery: His parents had their own restaurant and passed their passion for haute cuisine on to their son. The starting gun for his professional career, however, was fired when he started his professional training at the Bellevue Palace in 1988. Today, he leads the hotel’s team of about 30 chefs and oversees 2 000 banquets and events every year. After several inspiring years of working elsewhere, he returned to Berne 12 years ago. His work has earned him numerous major awards, including three world championship titles with the Swiss national team at competitions in Chicago, Singapore, and Basel.

Now a
world-celebrated ceviche king Gastón
Acurio met Astrid Gutsche, a young German pastry chef, at Le Cordon Bleu in
Paris in the early 1990s. Together, they returned to Acurio’s native Lima. In
Peru, the couple set out to modernise the then fairly unknown local cuisine, to
open it up for international influences and to put it on the world’s
gastronomic map.

Soon, they found a 300-year-old colonial mansion where they opened their famous “Astrid y Gastón” in Lima. To this day, Casa Moreyra is considered a culinary stronghold in a setting that can feel more like a forgotten paradise than a Latin American capital.

Restaurant

96 climate
zones, 50 types of chillies, 3000 potatoes cultivars – and ceviche and pisco
sour, of course: The culinary delights of the region between the Pacific and
the Andes draw on seemingly inexhaustible sources. Today, «Astrid y
Gastón » ranks among the world’s most prestigious gourmet labels with more
than restaurants on both American continents, including San Francisco and
Buenos Aires, as well as in London, Madrid, Barcelona, Paris, and now Geneva.

Nouvelle cuisine à la peruana

The heart of
the “Astrid y Gastón” art of cookery still resides at the Casa Moreyra in Lima,
and it provides the DNA for all restaurants abroad. It is where the chefs
receive their training before they travel to one of the international spin
offs. Guests will also recognise the restaurants by their characteristic
interior design: Light and friendly, modern and functional, and with hints to
the Latin America we know from movies. Guests will find ceviche, of course,
tiradito (raw fish, cut in Sashimi-like style, prepared à la minute and served
with a sauce, anticucho skewers, and lomo saltado (a wok dish with beef).

«My dishes are
straight forward, unfussy. I try to allow as much room as possible for the
taste of meat, fish, spices, and all other ingredients to unfold,” Gaston
Acurio explains his work. He uses local Peruvian ingredients: “Limes are not
always available in Geneva, and we buy chillies in Peru,” says César Bellido,
the talented 29-year-old “Yakumanka” head chef. He, too, completed the
traditional “Acurio training” in Lima before starting his job at the luxurious
outpost at Geneva’s Mandarin Oriental.

Tiradito Bachiche

A brief getaway in Peru

«Yakumanka»
means «water and pan» in the language of the Incas. A pot filled with water is
a wonderful metaphor for a good life.